The Book of Household Management - Mrs. Beeton

Passing the knife down in the direction of from 1 to 2, a not too thin slice should be helped; and the carving of a tongue may be continued in this way until the best portions of the upper side are served. The fat which lies about the root of the tongue can be served by turning the tongue, and cutting in the direction of from 3 to 4.

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CHAPTER XIV.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE SHEEP AND LAMB.

678. OF ALL WILD or DOMESTICATED ANIMALS, the sheep is, without exception, the most useful to man as a food, and the most necessary to his health and comfort; for it not only supplies him with the lightest and most nutritious of meats, but, in the absence of the cow, its udder yields him milk, cream, and a sound though inferior cheese; while from its fat he obtains light, and from its fleece broadcloth, kerseymere, blankets, gloves, and hose. Its bones when burnt make an animal charcoal—ivory black—to polish his boots, and when powdered, a manure for the cultivation of his wheat; the skin, either split or whole, is made into a mat for his carriage, a housing for his horse, or a lining for his hat, and many other useful purposes besides, being extensively employed in the manufacture of parchment; and finally, when oppressed by care and sorrow, the harmonious strains that carry such soothing contentment to the heart, are elicited from the musical strings, prepared almost exclusively from the intestines of the sheep.

679. THIS VALUABLE ANIMAL, of which England is estimated to maintain an average stock of 32,000,000, belongs to the class already indicated under the ox,—the Mammalia; to the order of Rumenantia, or cud-chewing animal; to the tribe of Capridae, or horned quadrupeds; and the genus Ovis, or the "sheep." The sheep may be either with or without horns; when present, however, they have always this peculiarity, that they spring from a triangular base, are spiral in form, and lateral, at the side of the head, in situation. The fleece of the sheep is of two sorts, either short and harsh, or soft and woolly; the wool always preponderating in an exact ratio to the care, attention, and amount of domestication bestowed on the animal. The generic peculiarities of the sheep are the triangular and spiral form of the horns, always larger in the male when present, but absent in the most cultivated species; having sinuses at the base of all the toes of the four feet, with two rudimentary hoofs on the fore legs, two inguinal teats to the udder, with a short tail in the wild breed, but of varying length in the domesticated; have no incisor teeth in the upper jaw, but in their place a hard elastic cushion along the margin of the gum, on which the animal nips and breaks the herbage on which it feeds; in the lower jaw there are eight incisor teeth and six molars on each side of both jaws, making in all 32 teeth. The fleece consists of two coats, one to keep the animal warm, the other to carry off the water without wetting the skin. The first is of wool, the weight and fineness of which depend on the quality of the pasture and the care bestowed on the flock; the other of hair, that pierces the wool and overlaps it, and is in excess in exact proportion to the badness of the keep and inattention with which the animal is treated.

680. THE GREAT OBJECT OF THE GRAZIER is to procure an animal that will yield the greatest pecuniary return in the shortest time; or, in other words, soonest convert grass and turnips into good mutton and fine fleece. All sheep will not do this alike; some, like men, are so restless and irritable, that no system of feeding, however good, will develop their frames or make them fat. The system adopted by the breeder to obtain a valuable animal for the butcher, is to enlarge the capacity and functions of the digestive organs, and reduce those of the head and chest, or the mental and respiratory organs. In the first place, the mind should be tranquillized, and those spaces that can never produce animal fibre curtailed, and greater room afforded, as in the abdomen, for those that can. And as nothing militates against the fattening process so much as restlessness, the chief wish of the grazier is to find a dull, indolent sheep, one who, instead of frisking himself, leaping his wattles, or even condescending to notice the butting gambols of his silly companions, silently fills his paunch with pasture, and then seeking a shady nook, indolently and luxuriously chows his cud with closed eyes and blissful satisfaction, only rising when his delicious repast is ended, to proceed silently and without emotion to repeat the pleasing process of laying in more provender, and then returning to his dreamy siesta to renew the delightful task of rumination. Such animals are said to have a lymphatic temperament, and are of so kindly a nature, that on good pasturage they may be said to grow daily. The Leicestershire breed is the best example of this lymphatic and contented animal, and the active Orkney, who is half goat in his habits, of the restless and unprofitable. The rich pasture of our midland counties would take years in making the wiry Orkney fat and profitable, while one day's fatigue in climbing rocks after a coarse and scanty herbage would probably cause the actual death of the pampered and short-winded Leicester.

681. THE MORE REMOVED FROM THE NATURE of the animal is the food on which it lives, the more difficult is the process of assimilation, and the more complex the chain of digestive organs; for it must be evident to all, that the same apparatus that converts flesh into flesh, is hardly calculated to transmute grass into flesh. As the process of digestion in carnivorous animals is extremely simple, these organs are found to be remarkably short, seldom exceeding the length of the animal's body; while, where digestion is more difficult, from the unassimilating nature of the aliment, as in the ruminant order, the alimentary canal, as is the case with the sheep, is twenty-seven times the length of the body. The digestive organ in all ruminant animals consists of four stomachs, or, rather, a capacious pouch, divided by doorways and valves into four compartments, called, in their order of position, the Paunch, the Reticulum, the Omasum, and the Abomasum. When the sheep nibbles the grass, and is ignorantly supposed to be eating, he is, in fact, only preparing the raw material of his meal, in reality only mowing the pasture, which, as he collects, is swallowed instantly, passing into the first receptacle, the paunch, where it is surrounded by a quantity of warm saliva, in which the herbage undergoes a process of maceration or softening, till the animal having filled this compartment, the contents pass through a valve into the second or smaller bag,—the reticulum, where, having again filled the paunch with a reserve, the sheep lies down and commences that singular process of chewing the cud, or, in other words, masticating the food he has collected. By the operation of a certain set of muscles, a small quantity of this softened food from the reticulum, or second bag, is passed into the mouth, which it now becomes the pleasure of the sheep to grind under his molar teeth into a soft smooth pulp, the operation being further assisted by a flow of saliva, answering the double purpose of increasing the flavour of the aliment and promoting the solvency of the mass. Having completely comminuted and blended this mouthful, it is swallowed a second time; but instead of returning to the paunch or reticulum, it passes through another valve into a side cavity,—the omasum, where, after a maceration in more saliva for some hours, it glides by the same contrivance into the fourth pouch,—the abomasum, an apartment in all respects analogous to the ordinary stomach of animals, and where the process of digestion, begun and carried on in the previous three, is here consummated, and the nutrient principle, by means of the bile, eliminated from the digested aliment. Such is the process of digestion in sheep and oxen.

682. NO OTHER ANIMAL, even of the same order, possesses in so remarkable a degree the power of converting pasture into flesh as the Leicestershire sheep; the South Down and Cheviot, the two next breeds in quality, are, in consequence of the greater vivacity of the animal's nature, not equal to it in that respect, though in both the brain and chest are kept subservient to the greater capacity of the organs of digestion. Besides the advantage of increased bulk and finer fleeces, the breeder seeks to obtain an augmented deposit of tissue in those parts of the carcase most esteemed as food, or, what are called in the trade "prime joints;" and so far has this been effected, that the comparative weight of the hind quarters over the fore has become a test of quality in the breed, the butchers in some markets charging twopence a pound more for that portion of the sheep. Indeed, so superior are the hind quarters of mutton now regarded, that very many of the West-end butchers never deal in any other part of the sheep.